Dénes Krusovszky had only published poems and short novels before, and his first big novel, Akik már nem leszünk sosem (Those who we’ll never be anymore) , became one of 2018’s literary sensations in Hungary. All the critics loved it, so I was keen on reading it, and it doesn’t disappoint, it’s an absolute masterpiece. I haven’t read such a good Hungarian book since Attila Bartis’s A nyugalom. It sucks you in immediately and it’s hard to put down the book.
The novel covers a long period, between 1956 and 2017, and in terms of content it is rich and dense. We can read about the 1956 revolution, an anti-Semitic pogrom, a sanatorium with iron lung patients, the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe, the everyday life of the Y generation, break-ups, the immigration from the small countryside Hungarian towns and eventually from Hungary, broken family relationships, and the current Hungarian social atmosphere. It’s a huge challenge for a writer to keep all these things together without losing control of the main narrative, but Krusovszky does it with great skill.
The main character is Bálint Lente, a Y-generational online journalist living and working in Budapest, who after a quarrel with his girlfriend takes a train to his hometown to attend a childhood friend’s wedding. The novel is made of five chapters which, except for the first short prologue chapter, are more or less equally long (around a hundred pages). The narrative is not linear, the chapters cover different periods, it seems as if we were reading parallel stories or independent novels. It takes some time when we understand that these different stories are very strongly interlinked with each other, and everything converges to the same end.
Krusovszky is very bold with the jumps between different times. The second chapter describes Lente’s quarrel with his girlfriend and his trip to his hometown, meeting with his mother and old friends. We feel the tension and we are waiting for some explosion in the wedding, however, Krusovszky suddenly jumps back to 1986, and writes a chapter of over a hundred pages about the life in a sanatorium with iron lung patients. You must be a very good writer to do this without making the reader put down the book for good, but he is able to do it. This seemingly boring and completely unrelated story quickly sucks you in, and we are going back to 1956, to the Hungarian revolution against the Soviet communist regime. Although this revolution symbolises for us Hungarians the bravery of the people to fight against a dictatorial regime, Krusovszky, relying on historical facts, shows another dimension of the revolution. Whereas in Budapest people are fighting for freedom, in Hajdúvágás (a fictitious town, in reality it is Hajdúvágás, a little town in north-east Hungary) the revolution turns into an anti-Semitic pogrom. Krusovszky made a big research of the actual facts and found that most people still think that the Jewish community of Hajdúvágás disappeared in 1944, and not after the 1956 pogrom. Although historians had already revealed this before, the commemorations are about 1944, and the 1956 events are unknown for the people. Hence this chapter is about selective memories ending with a kind of a catharsis, but which doesn’t help us understand what’s going on and why that is relevant.
Then we jump back to the wedding in 2013. For me this is the high point of the novel. Writing over a hundred pages about a single night of a wedding is a big challenge, especially in contrast with the previous chapter which covers 30 years. Krusovszky enjoys playing with time, and he is able to slow it down, but at the same time maintains the dynamics of the story. Although the chapter is about the wedding, Krusovszky uses flashbacks to look back into the past, but he does it in a way that it doesn’t become confusing. The description of the wedding is simply masterful. Lente’s unease with the event and the people, drinking and hugging with the old friends, awkward conversation with the former physics teacher, sitting at the same table with the ex-girlfriend, the embarrassing music, and the memories that rise up to the surface all add to this emotional pandemonium. Krusovszky writes in first person, which is the best way to show how Lente reflects to the world around him and how uncertain and lost he is in his own life.
The last chapter jumps to 2017, and brings a resolution, at least in the sense that we understand how the seemingly unrelated stories connect and everything falls into place. Well, almost everything. We cannot expect a catharsis everywhere, unless we are in a Hollywood movie. It’s annoying when we don’t understand why something happened the way it happened, a break-up of a relationship or friendship, family issues, etc. We don’t want to accept this and want to know the reasons, and this is especially true in a book or in a movie. We want the author to show us the reasons. However, many times these reasons remain hidden and we can’t do anything about it. In Lente’s life there are also some issues that are not unfolded. The persons in questions don’t speak about it and the whole thing remains loose and unresolved. This is how life is and Krusovszky doesn’t want to explain everything, at least not directly, sometimes he just gives us clues which may point to a possible interpretation.
The characters and the whole Hungarian reality are entirely genuine and fantastically described, even the secondary characters are very well designed and reflect typical persons or ways of thinking in the society, let alone the great dialogues. The old friends among which some leave the small and boring home town, not because they have high dreams, but because of the lack of opportunities, and those who stay and sink into the melancholy and alcohol. Once in a while they meet and are able to communicate, but mostly about the past, because their present worlds are so different as if they didn’t speak the same language. The father, an acknowledged dentist who one day leaves the family with a nurse and moves to the other side of the country. The mother, who stays and is unable to start a new life and is just waiting for something to happen. And the whole society, the media, the politics that infiltrate in the everyday life, we hear the news from the tv and radio in the background, the corruption, the hatred generated by the government, and the people who desperately leave the country for the hope of a better life somewhere else. An excellent sociography behind the main story.
An amazing novel about Hungary, personal relationships, the Y generation, and memory, an absolute must-read. There are lots of great quotes from the book, my favourite is in the very end: ” Akik már nem leszünk sosem, épp annyira mi vagyunk, mint akiknek hisszük magunkat. (Those who we’ll never be anymore are we at least as much as those we believe we are.)”
If there is a novel that calls for a movie, this is one. I would be very much looking forward to it.